Beverage dispensing systems in commercial settings like restaurants, bars, stadiums, casinos, and others with large scale inventory sales tend to suffer from challenges with inventory loss, training, and transaction tracking. Many of these establishments suffer high “pour” rate costs that reflect the inventory loss that occurs in these situations. Each beverage dispensing location has a human user that physically dispenses the beverages for patrons. Oftentimes, users over-pour beverages, either intentionally or accidentally, which results in wasted inventory and lost profits. Further, these establishments tend to have high sales volumes of beverages, which generates a large amount of data and they often find inventory reconciliation with sales transaction very difficult.
Some owners use existing pour tracking systems can monitor the volume of a beverage being dispensed at a particular dispensing location by placing a flow rate sensor in-line with the dispensed beverage. However, those in-line tracking systems often cause decreased beverage pour quality, specifically with beverages like beer, because the in-line sensors disrupt the fluid flow of the beverage being dispensed. In the example of beer, the flow of the beer becomes turbulent as a result of being forced to flow over an in-line flow rate sensor which generates too much foam in the dispensed beer. If a beer is poured with too much foam, the user may choose to re-pour the beer or serve it to the patron with the risk that the patron will be dissatisfied with the quality of the beer. Also, the output from the conventional in-line flow rate systems is raw data of the volume of dispensed beverage at a particular beverage dispenser. Large establishments quickly generate immense amounts of data about beverages poured and owners are challenged to make sense of the raw data generated by the conventional systems.
The beverage dispensing art would benefit from improved beverage dispensing monitoring systems and methods that help improve accountability, data integrity, and profitability.